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When you own a business that buys from the public, you get some interesting transactions—often every day, if not every hour. My used record store has been a source of thousands of such exchanges of items for cash. But a recent one stands alone.
On one of those crazy hot days in July, an agitated young man bounded in with two Pottery Barn boxes overflowing with compact discs, most of them sealed. He said he cleans out apartments for landlords and I believed him. We get a lot of those guys. They’re legit, selling abandoned albums and whatnot, often unusable, but not always.
This guy’s stuff was nearly all multiple copies of sealed promotional CDs from 2000. I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve known who have interned for major record companies as promo-team members who seldom, if ever, got the right free product to the right people. So, again, I wasn’t suspicious of where he got the loot.
While he reeked of marijuana, he wasn’t passive or mellow. He was, well, a bit scary to my part-timer and obnoxious as heck to me, demanding huge money for a couple of hundred items. A few were worthy, but the majority were only good for their clean, clear, uncracked cases to be used as replacements.
Ah, but instead of returning the dude’s fire, I instead employed what I’d learned in my reconstituted Zen bible, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Men. Go ahead, laugh. But I love that book. The public and my workers are the prime beneficiaries, especially chapter 35: “Have Conflict Without It Having You.”
As it became painfully obvious this high young man was on something more vicious than everyday weed, I found his style of abrasive negotiation getting under my skin. My Irish jugulars were throbbing. Within a few minutes of fruitless back-and-forth over the value of his stash, I found myself resisting an old familiar urge—smashing him in the face.
I was determined to detach emotionally from the deal, yet see it through. I ignored the throbbing in my neck. I also calmly ratcheted my offer lower and then even more quietly refuted his every selling point. He could have walked, but he didn’t. He started to shout. I spoke more softly.
He still didn’t walk, instead drawing himself up to his full size, getting closer to me as if to intimidate. I lowered my price even further.
There’s an old African saying: Make him angry, make him stupid. The young man caved, selling me well over 200 CDs for $20.
I’ve bought smart before, but not like this. Still, it took me 10 minutes of deep breathing to truly regain my inner calm. But the second-best part was when, on the way out, he asked why “everybody in these record stores I been to today is short with me?”
I replied, “You’re getting back the energy you’re putting out. You’re very stressful.”
You would have thought I said his mother was a cow. He went ballistic, called me the queen of all bad names and stomped out.
Later that day, a friend who works down the street at a head shop came in and I told him the story of the toxically high young man. “Bath salts,” my friend replied, referring to a substance that, when snorted, for example, makes you as crazy as an outhouse rat.
A real bath salt is said to mimic the cleansing properties of natural mineral water or hot springs, which sort of involves a sweating out of toxins.
And so the belligerent young man had met his match in someone who doesn’t bother sweating the small stuff.
Isn’t that what they call sweet irony?
